On the idea of reviewer=completely unbiased observer.
No one is saying this. I'm not sure where you got this idea.
Ballocks. I'm sorry, but do any of you read movie reviews? Or car reviews? Or, heck, reviews of pretty much anything out there? Reviewers are not unbiased. Reviewers are not there to tell the audience a neutral point of view. Look at virtually any movie reviewer and you'll see that they are most certainly not a neutral observer.
Ostensibly, reviewers
are supposed to support a "neutral" point of view, or at least represent the point of view of their average readership. Good reviewers keep that in the back of their mind while playing/watching/reading through (and later analyzing) the game/movie/whatever in question - something might irk them personally, but unless they feel it would also irk their average audience, they'll disregard it for the sake of the integrity of the review.
A reviewer reviews based on his or her preferences and makes those preferences pretty clearly obvious. Neuroglyph has done that and done it pretty clearly.
That's fine, if your preferences and review criterion are close enough to your audience's to make them useful. This thread, however, makes it pretty clear that Neuroglyph's style of review
doesn't provide the sort of information or viewpoint much of his audience is looking for in a review.
The fact that you are spending time talking about his review means he's done his job well.
Reviews are not high art. Critical discussion of their content does not elevate them.
Criticising him for doing what a reviewer should do is pretty strange.
And if he were doing what a reviewer should do, you would have a point. We've pointed out, however, that he has
not reviewed this product. He has compared it to another game in another medium and another format and found it lacking for the sake of the medium and the format. But if I'm the sort of person
looking to play in that medium and that format (that is, I'm the sort of person who might be interested in a review of a casual, Facebook D&D app), then criticizing the game on account of its medium and format tells me
nothing; I've already accepted their inherent strengths and limitations, and what I'm looking for is whether or not the game provides an enjoyable play experience that takes advantage of those strengths and limitations.
Look at his criticisms. Do you agree with them?
Most of them, yes. But unfortunately his real criticisms of the
game are buried in a pile of lackluster comparisons to a different game.
For a perfect illustration of why the "review" style of comparing a game to a different game and finding it lacking is a terrible way to review something, look at the Metacritic scores of
Dragon Age 2.
The original Dragon Age (Origins) has a Metacritic score of 86. Dragon Age 2 has a score of 79. That's only seven points lower. And you know why? Because professional reviewers
know what they're doing. Yes, the second game made some significant departures from the first, but it remained
an enjoyable play experience, and the job of a reviewer is to tell you whether or not you should go out and buy the game.
But
user reviews? Those reviews done by random guys on the internet?
They're terrible.
Dragon Age 2 has an aggregate user review score of
4.4 out of 10. Meanwhile, Dragon Age: Origins?
7.5. If we translated these to a 100-point scale, Dragon Age 2's user review score would be
31 points lower than Dragon Age: Origins'.
Again, difference in professional review scores?
Seven. Difference in user review scores?
Thirty-one.
Why is this? Because random internet guy after random internet guy showed up to complain about how Dragon Age 2 sucked
compared to Dragon Age: Origins.
Well great. That's awesome if I loved Dragon Age: Origins and am so fickle with my gameplay demands that changing the game will ruin the series for me, no matter how enjoyable a game the sequel is. But if I'm new to the series? Suddenly I don't want to play Dragon Age 2, because the whole internet seems to hate it.
So review-by-comparison is terrible, and puts you on the same level as the hundreds of random internet people who pop into aggregate review sites to give a game a big fat
zero-point-zero because it's different than what they're used to.
For an even more ridiculous illustration of how random people make terrible reviewers without reasonable rubrics, see
this story on Portal 2's after-launch user reviews. Of course, after people actually
played the game (and read the scores of professional reviews lauding it as one of the best games ever made - it has a professional aggregate score of 95), the user review score began gradually climbing to where it is now. But initially? Some people were angry that it didn't measure up to another game (in this case, Portal), and it caused the aggregate user review score to spiral into meaninglessness.
Do you disagree? Think about what he's actually written. THAT'S what a reviewer should be doing. Forcing the reader to actually consider different viewpoints.
What different viewpoints? I don't read reviews to find out what other people took away from the game compared to what I took away - after all, I haven't even
played it yet if I'm combing through reviews. I read them to find out if I'll enjoy it. Ideally, I won't have to read multiple reviews. In fact, ideally, I should be able to hit up an aggregate review site and make purchase decisions based on its aggregate score and perhaps a handful of summarized bullet points.
Dull, dry presentation of "facts" without interpretation is not a review.
No one is asking for dull, dry presentation of facts. Facts are good, and an author's viewpoint that does its best to account for the audience of a review (and the intended audience of the product in question) is also a good thing.
What I
don't want is a review for a wheelchair that sums up by saying the wheelchair is crap because how are you supposed to run a marathon in this thing?
And if anyone's interested,
here is a list of recent news articles and reviews discussing Heroes of Neverwinter. Spoiler: they're
generally positive.
